


psychotic kid.

by valeskaisms



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Child Abuse, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Jerome isn’t straight, Lila is awful, M/M, Mental Instability, Nightmares, Other, Violence, Young Jerome, Young Jerome Valeska, obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-03-05 21:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18837109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valeskaisms/pseuds/valeskaisms
Summary: A more in depth exploration of Jerome’s childhood than Gotham would ever give us.[named after the song psychotic kids by YUNGBLUD]





	psychotic kid.

Thin white sheets — if they can even be called white with all the crusted patches of red — cling to him, soaked with sweat. His breath is ragged, uneasy, panicked. Fragments of the dream he woke from haunt his mind as he tries to calm himself. It isn’t unusual for Jerome to wake up like this. He remembers a time when he would bolt upright; broken screams filling the room. He’s learnt to be quiet since then. He learnt that the hard way. Screaming only brings the nightmare to life, only makes Lila come in here to m a k e him be quiet. Being awake somehow never seems any better than the nightmare realm he wakes from. Coming to his senses, Jerome peels the sheets from his skin. Lila’s drunken laughter can be heard through the wall, along with that of the man she’d be whoring herself out to later. Cringing, he turns onto his side, reaching for a cup of water he had poured the night before. He takes a sip of the now lukewarm water as his eyes begin to focus and adjust to being awake. The alarm clock beside him reads three fifteen AM. The clock used to belong to his brother, Jeremiah, but Jerome took it a long time ago when his brother got an upgrade (their mother seemed to harbour a favouritism of Jeremiah). He doesn’t see much of his brother any more, the two of them choosing to keep out of each other’s way as much as possible. They used to be inseparable, and Jerome would have done anything for Jeremiah, even throwing himself between Lila and his brother. Back then he was self-sacrificing like that. But Jerome soon learnt his lesson. Jeremiah began to lie, horrible, awful lies, telling Lila stories of ways Jerome had allegedly tried to kill him. This only served to make Lila hate Jerome more. Jerome knew he was trying to avoid the abuse by deflecting more abuse onto him, but although he was angry, it wasn’t the overriding emotion. He felt betrayal over all, and the bitter sting of sadness. Jerome’s head begins to hurt just thinking about it. It’s early and he’s way too tired to deal with such things, nor the thought of what’s probably happening in the next room, but he supposes Lila doesn’t care about that. She never did care about much. Besides, even if she did, with the amount of alcohol in her system he’s not sure she even knows what day it is anymore, let alone how early it is. It’s surprising that her liver hasn’t given up by now. Maybe one day it will. Part of him hopes she dies soon from alcohol poisoning. Part of him thinks that it wouldn’t be a painful enough death. No. Not nearly agonising enough. She deserves to hurt, the way she makes him hurt. He used the cry when she’d hit him. Of course he did. But he was weak for crying; he knows that now. Crying means that you can feel. And if you can feel, you can hurt. He’s had enough experience with the latter to know. Jerome decided a long time ago that Lila regrets his existence. It’s obvious; she wishes she’d only had one child, her precious Jeremiah who she can mould into her perfect little boy. He supposes that her violence is a punishment, supposed to teach him a lesson, to make him regret his existence as much as she does. He’s distracted from his thoughts momentarily as his hand catches on the sheets (the cheap material was always rough on the skin). Most of his hand is still blistered, although healing slowly. Memories of sizzling skin, boiling chicken stock, his uncle’s sadistic grin and that s m e l l come to mind. It very nearly overwhelms him, so Jerome chooses to instead focus on the burning sensation that comes when the material scratches against the wounded skin. Perhaps he should be flinching away, trying to avoid the pain, but instead he does it again, and again. It feels good to be able to take pain into his own hands, to have some control over it for once. To feel it under his own terms, not Lila’s. It feels like he can take back just some of the power his uncle tried to take from him that day in some strange way. The layer of blistered skin abrades away, pain flooding his senses as raw skin is revealed underneath. He stops only when thick blood starts to run from his hand. He doesn’t want Lila to punish him for making too much of a mess. An old discarded shirt suffices to stop the bleeding. Although not the most hygienic of choices, an infection is the least of his worries. The throbbing in his hand feels strangely soothing, and somehow it manages to lull him back to sleep for a little while. When he wakes again,woken by noise, it’s four thirty AM. There’s screaming. Loud screaming. He knows it’s Lila, because of course it is. Jerome almost thinks he’s still in his nightmare until he remembers that his real life is, in fact, just as much of a nightmare as his dream life. It takes him a moment to realise that Lila isn’t just generally shouting (which is more common than anyone would expect), but is in fact calling him. Dread seeps into his veins and clouds his brain for a few seconds. He takes a deep breath, preparing himself for the onslaught he’s likely about to receive, and drags himself into the next room. Lila and the man from last night — who Jerome thinks he recognises as one of the circus clowns — are entangled in her bed, unclothed, sheets barely covering their nudity. So Jerome squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself to forget the image of the two of them. He’s seen a naked body before, of course. There’s no way that he couldn’t have, especially with his mother being such a whore, and he’s old enough to know what a body looks like. But that doesn’t mean that Jerome is prepared to be faced with the naked body of his mother and a random man. Nausea washes over him. Despite standing there fully clothed, he feels violated, just by having to witness the scene. Lila doesn’t seem to understand this. She never seems to understand Jerome at all. Lila screams at him. Calls him disrespectful. Useless. Rude. Good for nothing. A mistake. She uses the excuse to get in every insult she possibly can. Tells him it’s disgusting not to look his mother in the eye. Jerome hears footsteps. Her voice gets suspiciously closer. He flinches before she’s even there. Then she’s jamming her fingers into his eye sockets, forcing his eyes open, fingers pressing so hard and deep into his eyes that he’s worried the eyeballs may just pop out of the socket or explode. But despite it all, he doesn’t cry. He wants to, but he doesn’t. Jerome refuses to. He. Doesn’t. Cry. No, he doesn’t give her the pleasure of seeing his tears. Instead, he surprises even himself with the burst of laughter that slips from between his lips. Something about using laughter to hide the pain feels strangely powerful. Lila, of course, doesn’t see the funny side. She greets his laughter with gritted teeth and hard knuckles against Jerome’s nose. They press into the soft skin, against the cartilage, purplish bruises already forming beneath the pressure. The bony knuckles rest there and Jerome holds his breath in anticipation. Her hand lifts upwards, and then swiftly dives downwards to crash back into his nose, smashing against the left side with tremendous force. Jerome hears a disgusting crack as her fist makes contact, and blood soon pours from his left nostril. He thinks his nose may be broken, if he’s recognised that sound correctly. It wouldn’t be the first time that Lila had broken Jerome’s nose, and he suspected it wouldn’t be the last. His eyes water, but he still does not cry. Instead, a breathless laugh again comes from him, although even he knows it’s no laughing matter. Lila is far from impressed at his response. She shakes her head, and spits at him, drops of alcohol-infused saliva scattering into his hair. And then he feels her her fingers claw at his scalp, and her vice-like grip on the ginger strands. Lila drags him by his hair across the room, and slams him against the wall, keeping her grip on his hair. It pulls on his scalp and the pain is burning, burning, burning, until he feels to wad of hair (and a portion of the skin attached to it, he fears) detach from his head in Lila’s hand. His ribs ache from being thrown against the wall and he finds it hard to breathe. One of Jerome’s legs has gone worryingly numb after contact with the wall. His body seems to give in. Lila holds up her hand in victory, displaying the clump of hair, matted with blood, as if a hunting trophy. Jerome’s laugh falls silent. He tries, of course, because he doesn’t want to look weak, to look defeated, but no sound comes out. No matter how hard he struggles, he simply can’t physically make a sound. Lila lands a parting kick to his chest to make sure, and Jerome instinctively curls inwards, pain yet again filling his body. He can still feel the imprint of her boot in the centre of his chest minutes later, and he feels like his heart may burst out of his chest. Everything hurts. It takes him almost twenty minutes to drag himself out of the trailer, away from Lila, away from being hurt. He pushes himself along the walls, slowly, pausing every so often when the pain gets too unbearable. But eventually he manages to get himself out of the trailer, by some miracle. He has to leave, just for an hour, no matter how much it hurts to move. Jerome knows things will only get worse if he sticks around. He isn’t sure where he can go, though. Jerome knows he doesn’t have long. He’ll have to return soon, or else Lila will be furious, and he can’t deal with another beating so soon. Elsewhere in the circus wouldn’t be much better than the trailer either. So he decides to go for a walk (or, realistically, more like a crawl with the state he is in), just across the imaginary border of where the circus tents end and the city streets begin. Jerome ends up slumped against a building, sat on the dirty floor of a dingy back street. His body still hurts, but he hopes perhaps he’ll feel slightly better away from home. The street is dark, and seems devoid of any signs of life other than the odd rat or stray. These are the kind of places you see on the news where people end up being brutally murdered, but Jerome supposes that would be bliss compared to Lila Valeska. A mangy stray cat passes by him, its fur the same colour as Lila’s hair. It makes him think of his mother, and intrusive thoughts swarm his head like angry wasps. Intrusive thoughts have been bothering more and more often lately, but he doesn’t think they’ve ever been this hard to ignore. They echoe and rebound in his head. [Kill it. KILL IT. Make it suffer. Make it suffer like you. Do what you’d like to do to Lila, we both know you’d never have the guts to do it to her. Pretend it’s her. Kill it. Kill it!] The thoughts take over him, and they consume him. And so he does exactly what they had suggested. Jerome fishes the penknife from his pocket. He isn’t sure why he always keeps it with him when he’s too cowardly to ever use it to defend himself, but it will at least come in handy now. Violence is all he’s ever known, and for once he craves to be the one in control of it, to be on the giving end of the pain for once. He holds the stray down, rips the bottom of his shirt and stuffs the animals mouth with it so it won’t bite him. He pictures Lila’s face. Somehow managed to convince himself that hurting the cat is akin to hurting Lila. He skins it, with the precision of a prize butcher, while the stray whimpers and lets out feline cries. He slits open its stomach, pulls its insides out, leaves them hanging from the wound. Then Jerome watches the life slowly drain from the cat. Watches the helpless, desperate look on its face as it dies. He pictures that look on Lila’s face, loses himself in his vivid imagination. For a moment he even starts to believe it really is Lila that he’s murdered. It’s perfect. But he soon comes back to the bitter reality, disappointed to find nothing but a torn apart stray cat. He almost feels sorry. If only for the fact that the stray reminds him of himself in the fact that they are both unwanted, both alone. Even so, he doesn’t quite find himself sorry. In fact, it’s quite on the contrary. Jerome finds he feels as though he’s achieved a sick fantasy he never knew he had. He hates to admit it, but the power of taking another creature’s life away felt good. It felt good to finally have power for once, to be the victor and not the defeated. To have power that couldn’t simply be taken away with a punch or an insult, not even by Lila. Jerome isn’t sure how to feel about the surge of pleasure he felt. He’s worried that he may be going mad, although Lila did always say that he was crazy anyway. He’s left feeling conflicted. His hands are bloody, but he supposes he could blame that on his injuries if his whore of a mother bothered to ask. He wipes them to a sufficient standard on his already bloody shirt. He thinks he should head back to the trailer soon. He’s tempted to run away, so he never has to see Lila or his uncle again. But he fears that she’d find him somehow, and things would only be a million times worse for him, so he discards the idea of leaving it all behind. When he stands, he discovers he’s limping and that his body aches even worse than it did before. It takes him a while, but he manages to get back to the trailer. Jerome collapses in a heap the moment he gets through the door. Lila doesn’t stir. She seemingly didn’t even notice that he was gone, clearly too intoxicated to have any grasp on reality. A half empty bottle hangs precariously within her loosening grasp. He reaches from the ball he has crumpled into and gently takes it from her and places it on the table to avoid it smashing. He’d only get the blame somehow anyway. And then he’s left staring at the brown bottle and it’s remaining liquid contents. Jerome has long promised himself never to drink alcohol. It’s nasty, nasty stuff, and he’d seen the way it could take effect on people. He wanted to believe that Lila’s behaviour could fully be blamed on the drink, but he knew better. Knows better. Perhaps the alcohol amplified her cruel nature, but her morals were always inherently flawed, and her vicious character is ingrained in every atom of her being. Part of him wants to smash the bottle; to pour the potent liquid down the sink; to throw it into the nearest river and watch it sink. That would only make things worse for him, though. Everything makes things worse for him. So he just sits idly for a while, eyeing his mother with hatred and, somewhere buried under layers of anger, a deep sadness mourning the fact that he’ll never have a mother who loves him. It’s at least an hour before he can summon the energy to move. When he does, Jerome drags himself from the floor and checks that Lila is still practically unconscious. Once he has confirmed that she is unaware of pretty much everything, he leaves the trailer. Anything at all has to be better than being around Lila for any longer. Jerome doesn’t venture far from the trailer this time, worried that his mother could awake at any point and come howling his name like a banshee on steroids. He perches on a bench, still sore from earlier, wincing as the uncomfortable metal seat presses against his bruises. Another circus boy (about six months older than himself, Jerome thinks) silently joins him a few minutes later. He’s seen the boy around a few times. They sit in comfortable silence, glancing at one another somewhat awkwardly every once in a while. The boy turns, and mumbles something. Jerome asks him to speak up, ready to hear some kind of insult, some kind of derogatory retort. What comes out from the boy confuses him. The boy tells Jerome that he’s beautiful. He doesn’t understand. Nobody has ever called him that before. Jerome’s tear ducts become wet, and he wishes he could blame it on allergies. Their eyes meet for a few moments and Jerome turns away, embarrassed. Unsure what to say. Unsure what to do. When he turns to face the boy again, he’s greeted with a distance of a few mere centimetres between them. Jerome freezes. Panics. And then there are lips on his and they taste like cigarettes and beer. He barely has time to wonder how the boy managed to get away with consuming such things before he’s flooded with the overwhelming reminder of his mother that comes with the smoky alcoholic taste. He doesn’t know what to do and oh god he feels like he’s going to be sick, the adrenaline pounds through his veins and he likes it. He likes the chaste kiss and the soft lips and the boy in front of him is kind of handsome he supposes, but the flashes of his mother make him feel nauseous, he just can’t help it. The lips pull back and Jerome doesn’t have time to contemplate what happened because the next thing he knows he’s being grabbed by the ear. Being dragged by a strength he can already recognise as his uncle. And his uncle drags him off to where nobody can see, to where Jerome is alone and vulnerable and scared. He hits him. Right across the face. Tells him that maybe, just maybe, his mother won’t find out if he’s lucky and he keeps his mouth shut about this beating. Jerome wants to ask what his mother won’t find out about, ask what he did wrong, but when his uncle spits at him, landing a kick to his stomach as he calls him a faggot, his question is answered. Punch after punch after kick after kick land into Jerome’s already broken body until he’s reduced to a near sobbing mess. He punctuates the violence with one last retort about how disgusting Jerome is. And then he’s gone, and the ginger haired boy is left ground into the mud. He isn’t sure how much longer he can take this. Everything grows hazy, and soon he slips out of consciousness and he passes out, seemingly going limp in the dirt. Surprisingly, it’s Lila that finds him. Not bothering to check if he’s breathing, she kicks him until he awakes to see his mother looking down at him rather displeased. There’s some chores to do, apparently, and he needs to do them because she’s working soon. He knows that by working she means whoring herself out. Because that’s more important to her than he is. He reluctantly agrees, but when he tries to stand his knees give way after all the beatings and he ends up flopping straight back down again. Lila taunts him, tells him how useless he is. She screams it at him, over and over and over. And at some point between her fifth utterance of it and her tenth, Jerome feels something snap inside him. Something that has been holding itself together by a mere thread. The last shreds of his tolerance. It’s the that Jerome decides he has to do something. But what to do?


End file.
